Suchformular

The Case Against the Marketing Cloud

The Marketing Cloud. A one-stop-shop for CMOs. Everything you need to create, manage, and execute marketing campaigns. Web. Social. Email. Mobile. Analytics. Targeting. From a single vendor. All in one easy-to-buy package.

Even HP/Autonomy has one: “Autonomy Marketing Cloud, a comprehensive set of marketing optimization offerings designed to help organizations increase market share, optimize marketing spend, and increase revenue across all channels."

I suspect Gartner's famous prediction that the CIO's technology budget is shifting to the CMO is responsible for the rapid rise of the Marketing Cloud. The Enterprise Software category was built on the CIOs budget. The Marketing Cloud is simply the new strategy for enterprise software companies to lock up the CMO's budget, like they have done with CIO budget for decades. Certainly, the idea of an end-to-end marketing cloud sounds appealing, doesn't it?

The issue with marketing clouds - or any integrated suite of technologies - is that they stifle innovation. No single vendor can keep pace with the rapid moving, dynamic, digital marketing technology landscape. And worse, marketing clouds vendors force customers to remain within their walled gardens, removing the ability for companies to remain agile when it comes to technology adoption.

I believe we're in an era of unprecedented innovation, especially as it applies to digital marketing, and companies who lock themselves into a Marketing Cloud are at risk of missing out on hugely disruptive technologies both now and in the future. History has shown that some of the greatest periods of technology innovation have occurred during times of product suite formation, like what we're seeing now with the rise of the Marketing Cloud. Let's look at a two examples:

Documentum (now EMC) pioneered the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite to manage all forms of content in a single platform - from documents to scanned images to digital assets to websites. Documentum pitched the dream of a single content repository to the CIO as a way to reduce the cost and complexity of managing content in multiple systems. It turns out that ECM didn't work. Costs didn't go down, they went up. Users revolted against the Documentum's rigid processes and poor user experience. The ECM failure created a new generation of pure-play innovators like Box, who re-invented document management with ease of use and simplicity of deployment.

Oracle's eBusiness Suite, created via the acquisitions of companies like Siebel and Peoplesoft was going to do create a end-to-end business platform for the CIO to manage HR, Finance, Sales, and Support. Instead, pure-play category killers like Workday, NetSuite, and Success Factors took market share away from Oracle who simply couldn't innovate fast enough.

The Marketing Cloud is just another attempt by technology vendors to grow revenue by locking CMOs into a single platform. The only winner is the vendor, who effectively locks customers into their platform for the long haul. Like the Hotel California, you can check-out any time you like... but you can never leave.

Ultimately, the case against the marketing cloud comes down to innovation. While Marketing Clouds may hit all of the feature checklists, they do so with the tradeoff of the long term flexibility and agility required to transform business.

Just to play devil's advocate here, we've seen a number
of marketing automation systems be gobbled up by larger companies.
Oracle with Eloqua, ExactTarget with Pardot, then Salesforce with
ExactTarget, and recently Adobe and Neolane.

If this trend of larger of the technology companies buying out
these companies continues, we might have a small area for integration
issues. Just wondering your thoughts on that trend.

Overall great post, and couldnt agree more with the pace of
technology outpacing the capabilities of these companies to innovate
and keep up.

Because both Workday and Success Factors have grown rapidly in
functionality. And they are both moving towards becoming
"platforms", if, indeed, they don't already fit that
description.

So there's a bigger question - what is the definition of
"platform", i.e. when is a pure play no longer a pure play.
And is that the moment to jump ship, to the next pure play? So the
best strategy is IT "hopscotch", jumping every 3-4 years
when pure plays get too big? Does data actually exist that supports
this approach as driving success?

Hi Tom! Thanks for commenting on my blog today. I do agree there
is risk with a CMO going with a single vendor. And certainly many
companies won't want to do that with Oracle. My concerns are
alleviated with Oracle's open and emphatic statement that they
will make sure to support integration with 3rd party apps, and they
will in turn create an App Ecosystem. This is very similar to
Marketo's positioning from earlier in April. This comes down to
execution. But ultimately I do think there will be an foundation
marketing platform that has to integrate with other apps (as needed)
that will help companies extract the necessary information that helps
drive the business. Cheers, Brian

Just one interesting point to raise - Acquia's site has
Marketo tags all over it, along with several other point solutions.
Acquia could also be potentially described as a point solution -
although your own site seems to promote the idea of a "unified
platform". The nature of point solution companies is to grow, and
to become larger. That often happens by acquisition, thus point
solutions slow morph into "platforms" over time, a process
Acquia seems to be in the midst of.

Rare is the point solution that doesn't eventually become part
of a platform - either by being acquired, or by acting as the acquirer
(after all, each of your 4 examples above started as "point
solutions" initially).

So I see three problems with this article -
1) No disclosure that you are a customer of a competitor of the
solutions whose vision you are disagreeing with
2) No clarity as to when a point solution becomes a
"platform".
3) No alternative - the nature of point solutions is to become
platforms. Are you advocating that customers jump ship every time
their point solution grows beyond a certain point?

Ultimately, this seems a bit of a silly debate. The answer is never
"either or" - it's both. New markets will initially
have solutions that solve one specific problem. As those markets
mature, solutions will combine and grow. There will always be space
for both mature platforms and brand new point solutions, I would be
curious to hear of even one enterprise organization that successfully
sticks with 100% one or the other in all areas of IT.

Neuen Kommentar schreiben

Plain text

Keine HTML-Tags erlaubt.

Internet- und E-Mail-Adressen werden automatisch umgewandelt.

HTML - Zeilenumbrüche und Absätze werden automatisch erzeugt.

Filtered HTML

Use [acphone_sales], [acphone_sales_text], [acphone_support],
[acphone_international], [acphone_devcloud], [acphone_extra1] and
[acphone_extra2] as placeholders for Acquia phone numbers. Add class
"acquia-phones-link" to wrapper element to make number a link.

To post pieces of code, surround them with <code>...</code> tags. For PHP code, you can use <?php ... ?>, which will also colour it based on syntax.